The median voter hypothesis is important to endogenous growth theories because it provides the political mechanisms through which voters in more unequal countries re-distribute a greater proportion of income and thus (it is argued), by blunting incentives, reduce the country's growth rate. But...

The authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. They estimate the risk insurance models by Generalized Method of Moments, treating income and household size as endogenous. Insurance exists for all wealth groups, although the...

The rural economy of developing countries has long been regarded as synonymous with agriculture but in recent years this view has begun to change. Such diverse activities as government, commerce, and services are now seen as providing most income in rural households. Applying decomposition...

Using household data from five successive national surveys, the author analyzes the microdeterminants of (and changes in) consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh from 1983 to 1996. Education, demographics, land ownership, occupation, and geographic location all affect...

Seasonal poverty in Bangladesh, locally known as monga, refers to seasonal deprivation of food during the pre-harvest season of Aman rice. An analysis of household income and expenditure survey data shows that average household income and consumption are much lower during monga season than in...

Two tradeoffs have been widely seen to severely constrain the scope for attacking poverty using redistributive transfers in poor countries: an equity-efficiency tradeoff and an insurance-efficiency tradeoff. The author provides a critical overview of recent theoretical and empirical work that...

The"stylized fact"that distribution must get worse with economic growth in poor countries before it can get better turns out not to be a fact at all. Growth's effects on inequality can go either way and are contingent on several other factors. The authors found no sign in the new cross-country...

Why does income inequality differ among countries? Using a sample of 80 countries from the 1980s, the author shows that two types of factors explain variations in income inequality. The first are factors that are, in the short term, independent of economic policies and are included in the...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of poverty and income inequality during the recovery phase of the transition that characterized the Republic of Latvia in the late 1990s. Despite a continued rise in income inequality, empirical evidence suggests an improvement in living standards, owing largely...

One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This paper documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. Trend #1: Poor country growth rates have accelerated and are higher than rich...